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The 13th of May brought several downer developments — and it wasn't even a Friday. First, huge layoffs were announced at Canadian auto plants, in large part because our factories turn out vehicle lines tending toward SUVs and light trucks, and Americans have stopped buying both.

Later the same day things got even glummer, though the setting could not have been nicer — a huge rented tent beside a big red barn in South Delta. Century Group would like to turn these fields straddling the communities of Boundary Bay and Tsawwassen into the hub of a new suburban community for 5,000 people. The occasion was the presentation of drawings and ideas produced for this pastoral site in a design charrette stage-managed by Andres Duany, the co-founder of New Urbanism.

Worse and worse, I thought, as I watched Mr. Duany and his flown-in team present a vision of leafy low-density suburbia while claiming for themselves a front line position in the good green wars. Mr. Duany boasted the schemes he presented were "pioneering designs."

They were pioneering only in the rustic architectural vocabulary that popped up in the drawings. Call it "pseudo-agro vernacular" — Mr. Duany cited 19th-century rural Swedish agricultural buildings as valid sources for building "up here in the north," on the shores of "Bounty Bay" (the Floridian actually meant to say Boundary Bay, the body of water separating Point Roberts from Surrey).

In the Lower Mainland's urban fringes, we still take New Urbanism seriously, in the same way we still lust after Ford Explorers. My own view is that history will regard New Urbanism as a last-gasp attempt to reform suburbanism from within, before high energy prices and new respect for land compels much denser development.

This new wave of high density combined with high amenity is homegrown. It has turned the very word "Vancouver" into a verb and an ideology: progressive cities now "Vancouverize" because they believe in "Vancouverism."

We Vancouverites sell American planners and developers high density, high amenity urban development attuned to the needs of the new century. Then local developers like the Century Group go consultant shopping in Miami and end up buying the terminally pleasant nostalgia of New Urbanism. Go figure.

Actually, checking the figures helps puncture New Urbanism's claims, especially the spiel that schemes like the one for the Southlands development present a radical increase in suburban residential densities. While this may be true by the standards of the sunbelt United States, Canadian cities have historically developed at higher densities, largely because we lack such sprawl-inducing public policies as the tax deductibility of mortgage interest and the federally funded interstate highway system.

New Urbanism is dangerous because it claims to cure the very sprawl and social class separation that it causes. There are worse ways to develop the suburbs, but none are so two-faced. The New Urbanism is city planning's equivalent of the "compact SUV."

The movement, led by Mr. Duany and partner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, is a compromise position that will be doomed by greater forces. Mr. Duany's two Southlands proposals, nicknamed "Tuck" and "Sweep," offer us a Honda Element and Land Rover LR2 when what Tsawwassen really needs is a Prius or Smart car.

The stakes are huge for the Century Group, which is owned by the long-established South Delta Hodgins family. I cannot fathom the convolutions of land use policies that left Southlands' 531 acres outside of B.C.'s Agricultural Land Reserve boundaries, but such is the case. Almost 20 years ago, a proposal to put 1,895 homes here from former owner George Spetifore was defeated by the regional council, because of objections to the sprawl it would induce across the entire Point Roberts peninsula.

If the Century Group's larger proposal is approved, the 2,000 housing units planned there will be worth between $1-billion and $2-billion, so a few hundred thousand spent on a lavish design charrette with pricey imported talent is chump change.

Century Group is sensitive to perceptions of this area as a bucolic or natural zone. It proposes that about one third of Southlands' site be left in a semi-natural state, one third used for intensive gardens for residents, and one third for yards and houses. That said, the net density will be barely four dwelling units per acre, only a 5 per cent increase from the defeated 1989 proposal.

As someone who occasionally does public lecturing and urban design consulting, I bow down in awe before Mr. Duany's marshalling of facts and features for a site he has visited only a few times (though he is buttressed by a squad of a dozen sub-consultants in every imaginable specialty).

Mr. Duany is a superb speaker and even better salesman, but Vancouver has New Urbanists who are his design equals, notably two teacher-consultants: University of British Columbia's Patrick Condon and Simon Fraser University's Michael von Hausen.

But even in the hands of designers as talented as all of these, New Urbanism is a dead letter. I hope South Delta rethinks things before this mock-utopia of gardens and lanes gets built.

CORRECTION

A photograph illustrating Trevor Boddy's column last week was incorrectly captioned. The photo showed Deas Island Regional Park, not the nearby Southlands.